[bayesianbot]

I think a lot of traits or experiences of autistic people are found in many neurotypicals as well, but the levels/intensity actually make it completely different. I definitely see your society box, but it can be quite different experience when the things you're hiding are main part of your being, brain and thoughts, for all your childhood.

I only have my experience - it made me extremely stressed for over a decade. It felt like anything I wanted to be or do was probably wrong in some way that I could never predict, as often things I thought would be perfectly fine turned out to be wrong, often for reasons that I really couldn't understand why or base general rules on. I was basically scared around the clock that somebody catches me behaving in wrong way, and I was always prepared to stop everything and start masking - looking like and doing things my peers expect me to. I went from talkative happy kid to extremely quiet person who probably always looked like I'm ready to soil my pants. I spoke really little for a ~decade, feeling like every time I'd open my mouth I'll say something wrong and it can be used against me. Later on I stayed the nights awake quiet in a dark room and slept when other people were home and awake, because then I could maximize the time being just myself without worrying about who I was expected to be. I pretty much still don't have a good relationship with my parents, they've never known who I am as I just learnt to hide myself. I think they're good parents, they just didn't know what to do with different kind of kid and made some terrible choices in a conservative time and place where having a "non-normal" kid was not acceptable outcome. And I wasn't really good at communicating what I was feeling or the kind of damage it was doing to me.

I know I took it in a really hard way, I knew even then. As autistic person I can have quite intense feelings. Like I said I'm sure there's autistic people who have the opposite opinion and experience. But I know I'm wasn't some special case, I'm quite sure there's a lot of trauma associated with a lot of ABA'd children. I can definitely understand the parent's viewpoint and also that there's wide spectrum of completely different cases, but I really don't think this should be ABA-parents vs autistic kids disagreement, we both would have a better life if we'd have some better therapies for autistic people - I just think the best starting point would be understanding what causes the stress/anxiety/discomfort/meltdowns and trying to fix the underlying issues, not from trying to hide the symptoms like we're praying gay away. The goal should be a child with as good, healthy life as possible, not some expected behavior. Maybe ABA style therapy is good for some and I expressed myself in kinda extreme way - there's some history behind that, that I really haven't fully processed in a healthy way yet - but parents should understand when it's used in the wrong way or wrong cases it can go really bad, it's not something that should be just done because good options are lacking.